Project management applications provide functions for planning, scheduling, resource allocation, budget control, and other aspects of managing projects. These applications may provide a collaborative environment in which users can view and interact with information related to the project. For example, activities of the project can be represented in ways such as tree hierarchy structure diagrams, Gantt charts, program evaluation and review technique (PERT) diagrams and so on for analyzing the activities.
In order to plan and manage a large project, it may be important to understand finer details of project's structure in depth, including important activities, on-going activities, its dependencies on other activities and the like. In the tree hierarchy structure diagrams, nodes are used to graphically represent activities in the project and first level activities are always displayed. When an activity in the first level is selected, sub-activities within the selected activity are displayed. Given the volume of nodes at each level, selecting a level for viewing may lead to a visual clutter of information. Also, in the course of the project, the focus may be on an activity or a sub-activity ongoing at that point in time or in certain cases, few succeeding and preceding activities and/or critical activities. In a tree structure representation, it may require additional effort and time to scan through the large data and locate such information. Also, using techniques such as Gantt charts and PERT network diagrams, only limited values may be scaled.
Further, users of project management applications may either painstakingly tape together printed, mural-sized charts on a weekly basis or rely primarily on spreadsheets. These techniques can be error-prone, and may be difficult to recognize finer details of the project structure. Therefore, it can be difficult to visualize large projects having big or huge data and analyze insight associated with an activity, which has to be surfaced and brought to the immediate attention of a project manager.